Today's title goes to the proponent(s) of a really weird idea. Via Irons In The Fire, we find this wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny article at Maxed Out Mama.
How To Become An Internet Legend Without Even Trying
I've been hanging out at DU [Democratic Underground] trying to talk sense into them. I have just realized that it is hopeless. These are not the people who flunked algebra, geology, long division and biology. These are the people who flunked algebra, geology, long division and biology, and attempted to burn down the school as revenge, failed, and are now attempting to expunge those ways of thinking from the known universe.
But I did get a laugh out of it, which I am mentally filing away in "It's an engineering problem".
A DU denizen demands that engineers just stop being so sloppy and lazy and work out a way to generate energy from earthquakes:
Laugh if you want, but someone needs to figure out how to harness the energy in earthquakes
Seriously. I'm no engineer so I can't even begin to think about this in real terms, but just imagine if that energy were somehow able to be captured and stored for use.
Then we'd be looking forward to earthquakes. Of course, then we'd also not have to have nuclear power plants around to worry about during quakes.
Nobel prize goes to the person who figures this one out. Ready, set, GO. Get on it.
I'm thinking MBA. This person was trained to manage! inspire! create! herd stupid engineers!
A poor soul still trying to wrestle the soul of DU into rationality (the fact that his name is MadHound predicts the result) responds:
It's the same problem of trying to harness the energy in lighting - First, how to predict where such an event will happen. Second, it is a massive amount of energy, how are you going to store it?
The original poster responds:
The difference is that quakes strike on faults - those are known locations. As for storing it, as I said, I'm no engineer so I have no idea. But I do know that some engineers are incredibly creative.
See! Mad management skillz invoked once again. At this point, I'm thinking Dilbert. Specifically, "And don't stand where the comet strikes oil!"
There's much more at the link. A must-read for your daily laugh!
(Note that I don't care about the politics over at DU, just as I wouldn't care if they were at its Republican equivalent. Doofidity knows no political boundaries - and neither does stupidity!)
Peter
It's OK, folks. We'll just harness some ingenuity, weld it to the earthquake energy storage units and watch the air clear up in a month.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time -- but you really should warn folks to put down the morning coffee before reading.
ReplyDeleteThis, from the comments at the link, says it all:
"I'm no engineer, but if we could have just captured the sexual energy of the parents of these idiots instead of letting them create said idiots, we'd be able to harness a lot of otherwise wasted energy.
# posted by Anonymous Joseph Gerbils : 11:53 AM "
Goatroper
I'd laugh, but I deal with these "Good Idea Fairy" types all day long.
ReplyDelete"Hey, wouldn't it be a good idea if we could use this experimental, unsupported open source PERL script that my kid found on-line to manage all of our systems instead of the rock-solid, supported, but expensive monitoring suite we already paid for? Take a couple of hours this week and get back to me on how successful you are!"
You're laughing now, but these are the folks who dreamed up "Carbon Tax Credits", so ANYTHING is possible.
ReplyDeleteAntibubba